I really don't have a clue. I would guess:
1) There is life out there
2) I think there is at least a reasonable chance there is NO other technology using life in the Universe.
3) I wouldn't be surprised at all if there were no life anywhere.
I'll tackle 2 first. Even when life does arise, the chances of it developing advanced technology must be exceedingly small. Consider that of billions of species that have come and gone and come and gone on this planet - only one has ever developed technology. And out of the about 5 billion years this planet has been here, it took about 4.99995 years for technology to appear. So something like 99.9995% of the time earth has been here, there has been no technology whatsoever. Dinosaurs ruled and roamed the Earth for tens of millions of years and never developed technology. Never needed to. They owned the planetary niche "large land animal" with no need for technology at all. We have a test case. The result was that it takes billions of years and billions of species for technology to appear and even then there was never any guarantee that it would appear. In fact, if it weren't for the extinction of the dinosaurs, probably due to cosmic chance and coincidence, we wouldn't be here. Take that asteroid smashing into the earth away and technology never develops on Earth. Big brains, hands, and bipedalism are not a necessary development in order to sit at the top of the food chain, to occupy an ecological niche - as proven by the dinos.
So even if there were millions of inhabited planets, I don't think it is necessarily true that technology wielding life would appear or has appeared.
1. I don't really need to say much about because it is the standard scientific philosophy and believed by most everyone. The universe is huge and even any small chance of their being life, even absurdly small, will lead to life all over the universe.
I only half-subscribe to that because if you were on the only planet in the universe with life, you wouldn't be able to tell either way. How would you know?
An example -
An Iraqi soldier is in a trench and an American bomb goes over his head and destroys a paper cup maufacturing plant. A strong wind blows and in a few days, millions of cups dot the Iraqi desert. 9 little cups land in his trench, one nearby. He notices that the one closest to him has an american $10 bill. He is shocked .. and happy! American money! How did this cup get $10 in it? Is this normal? Is it not? He doesn't know. It takes him quite an effort but he makes his way through the rest of the trench and collects the other cups. No more dollars. 9 cups checked. Then he looks at all the millions of cups in the desert and wonders whether there are American dollars in them. He wonders what the odds are that cups have american dollars in them but but knowing why or how a $10 bill appeared in the first one , he does not have enough information to make a guess.
That to me is the case of life in the Universe. How does one know from one example whether that is the normal case, a rare case, or a unique case? One case is no pattern whatsoever.
Last edited by Colin at Nov 19 2002, 06:30 PM
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